Governance is something that companies tend to think about on their second implementation of SharePoint.

Sometimes you have to go through the pain of difficult navigation (without a defined information architecture), tons of out of date content (without a content retirement policy), or searchability nightmares (after dumping gigabytes of unstructured data from a fileshare into SharePoint) to understand the value of a planned approach as opposed to a wild-west greenfield deployment.

There are certainly some templates from the likes of Joel Oleson and Paul Culmsee at the Governance Resource Center on TechNet, but dropping a 50 page governance document on a team that hasn't worked with SharePoint before will just cause eyes to roll back in heads.

Are there any useful strategies for communicating the importance of building even basic governance into a SharePoint implementation?

2 Answers
2

Here's my 2 cents on governance:
If you don't create a governance document, then your governance is "Ok everyone Free for all!" and you know how well that works.

I would start small and at least get them to help define the way new sites are created, this will get them to see that there is so much more to think about than just implementing SharePoint and installing it on servers.

For instance, if you create a site, you have to think about(not all inclusive):
1. What URL to use (where it falls in taxonomy)
2. What site template to use
3. What features to activate
4. Who can see/use the site
5. How security (the stuff you talked about in #4) will be managed
6. Whether or not the site can be searched
7. What colors/branding will be on the site
8. Whether or not SharePoint Designer can be used on that site and who can use it.
9. Whether the site will inherit navigation (if site collection, if it will have a portal site connection)
10. What the content of the site will be

And this is just the tip of the iceberg, you can get even further down, but just getting them to realize the basics of what goes into creating a simple site will make them stop and think that without some proper planning, you'll end up with a big mess.

Sure, this is a wiki so the requirements on the answers are lower than usual, but to just leave a link to a blog post by yourself without leaving any of the details in the post is not really how we like it!
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Robert Lindgren♦Jan 23 '14 at 10:30